1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, an image forming apparatus, a processing method thereof, and a program, in which print data is reserved in an image forming apparatus and the reserved print data is printed from a desired image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been conventionally known a “pull print (reservation print)” type printing system, where a print request is made from a printing apparatus (hereinafter, referred to as a multifunction peripheral) with respect to print data temporarily reserved on a server, and the print data outputted on the printing apparatus.
With this system, when performing a printing operation from an application, a user can output print data on a desired printing apparatus (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-176202).
In typical “pull print” systems, a user designates an external print server, not a specific printing apparatus, and loads print data onto the designated print server. Thus, when a commonly used printing apparatus is unavailable, a print instruction can still be issued to the external print server to enable printing on another printing apparatus.
In typical “pull print” systems, the external server needs to be installed, and the external server may be installed with multiple units depending on the number of users. In such a system configuration, the server management load increases. Therefore, there has been a need for systems where no servers are installed/established.
In the case of establishing a server-less system, a configuration that temporarily reserves print data on a hard disk drive (HDD) mounted in the printing apparatus has been considered. However, in order to output print data from another available desired printing apparatus instead of a commonly used printing apparatus, it is necessary to notify the other printing apparatuses constituting the system of a print data storage destination.
This requires preliminarily registering a notification destination in all printing apparatuses. A system having a high probability that the number of installed printing apparatuses will vary, e.g., increase or decrease, needs to constantly maintain a notification destination. Hence, actual operations can become difficult.
Instead of preliminarily registering the notification destination, notification can be accomplished by broadcasting the storage destination information. However, broadcasting is limited to the same segment. Hence, in a large-scale user environment, it is highly likely that the segment will be divided, and print data can be output from only printing apparatuses within a limited range. In addition, since broadcast communication may not check success or failure of the notification, it would be necessary to notify a storage destination whenever print data is received from a client terminal, thereby potentially overloading the associated network.
A function of a management server managing bibliographic information, as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-176202, may be provided in a printing apparatus to establish a server. However, whenever print data is received via the printing apparatus, it is necessary to transmit information on the print data to a printing apparatus managing bibliographic information, thus leading to an increase in a network load. In addition, unlike the server, equipment specification of the printing apparatus is low. Hence, it is difficult to cause the printing apparatus managing bibliographic information to perform an operation similar to that of the server, on which load may be intensively imposed.
In consideration of a specification of a printing apparatus, in the case of using the printing apparatus to manage print data or the like, a mechanism with a reduced communication load has been desired.